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• Is there a better term than "smoothness" or "granularity" to describe this language feature?

  - by Chris

  One of the best things about programming is the abundance of different languages. There are general purpose languages like C++ and Java, as well as little languages like XSLT and AWK. When comparing languages, people often use things like speed, power, expressiveness, and portability as the important distinguishing features. There is one characteristic of languages I consider to be important that, so far, I haven't heard [or been able to come up with] a good term for: how well a language scales from writing tiny programs to writing huge programs. Some languages make it easy and painless to write programs that only require a few lines of code, e.g. task automation. But those languages often don't have enough power to solve large problems, e.g. GUI programming. Conversely, languages that are powerful enough for big problems often require far too much overhead for small problems. This characteristic is important because problems that look small at first frequently grow in scope in unexpected ways. If a programmer chooses a language appropriate only for small tasks, scope changes can require rewriting code from scratch in a new language. And if the programmer chooses a language with lots of overhead and friction to solve a problem that stays small, it will be harder for other people to use and understand than necessary. Rewriting code that works fine is the single most wasteful thing a programmer can do with their time, but using a bazooka to kill a mosquito instead of a flyswatter isn't good either. Here are some of the ways this characteristic presents itself. Can be used interactively - there is some environment where programmers can enter commands one by one Requires no more than one file - neither project files nor makefiles are required for running in batch mode Can easily split code across multiple files - files can refeence each other, or there is some support for modules Has good support for data structures - supports structures like arrays, lists, and especially classes Supports a wide variety of features - features like networking, serialization, XML, and database connectivity are supported by standard libraries Here's my take on how C#, Python, and shell scripting measure up. Python scores highest. Feature C# Python shell scripting --------------- --------- --------- --------------- Interactive poor strong strong One file poor strong strong Multiple files strong strong moderate Data structures strong strong poor Features strong strong strong Is there a term that captures this idea? If not, what term should I use? Here are some candidates. Scalability - already used to decribe language performance, so it's not a good idea to overload it in the context of language syntax Granularity - expresses the idea of being good just for big tasks versus being good for big and small tasks, but doesn't express anything about data structures Smoothness - expresses the idea of low friction, but doesn't express anything about strength of data structures or features Note: Some of these properties are more correctly described as belonging to a compiler or IDE than the language itself. Please consider these tools collectively as the language environment. My question is about how easy or difficult languages are to use, which depends on the environment as well as the language.

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• List of usage information to collect in a web application

  - by Thomas Levine

  I'm writing a web application that will allow people to create accounts, edit stuff, send stuff to people, &c. I plan on recording things like when things were created and sent and stuff. Is there a list of usage information that one should collect in a web application? I'd like to see whether I'm missing something. Also, is there a list of usage information that I shouldn't collect (Like maybe information that people find private)?

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• Architecture/pattern resources for small applications and tools

  - by s73v3r

  I was wondering if anyone had any resources or advice related to using architecture patterns like MVVM/MVC/MVP/etc on small applications and tools, as opposed to large, enterprisy ones. EDIT: Most of the information I see on application architecture is directed at large, enterprise applications. I'm just writing small programs and tools. As far as using these architecture patterns, is it generally worthwhile to go through the overhead of using an MVC/MVVM framework? Or would I be better off keeping it simple?

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• SEO Copywriting - Tips on Making Sense to Humans and Google

  This article covers a range of handy tips that you can implement to boost your search engine ratings. It deals with striking the balance between optimising for search engines like Google and making sense to your human visitors. You'll learn a whole range of writing techniques to boost your ranking, along with some behind the scenes tips.

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• Converting a PowerShell Script into a Module

  This article is taken from the book Windows PowerShell in Action, Second Edition. The author provides an overview of the PowerShell modules, including their roles and terminology. He shows how modules allow packaging collections of PowerShell resources into shareable, reusable units. The author dives into the methods of writing Powershell scripts and converting a script into a module.

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• TypeScript first impressions

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  Anders published a video of his new project today, which aims at creating a superset of JavaScript, that compiles down to regular current JavaScript. Anders is a tremendously clever guy, and it always shows in his work. There is much to like in the enterprise (good code completion, refactoring and adoption of the module pattern instead of namespaces to name three), but a few things made me rise an eyebrow. First, there is no mention of CoffeeScript or Dart, but he does talk briefly about Script# and GWT. This is probably because the target audience seems to be the same as the audience for the latter two, i.e. developers who are more comfortable with statically-typed languages such as C# and Java than dynamic languages such as JavaScript. I don’t think he’s aiming at JavaScript developers. Classes and interfaces, although well executed, are not especially appealing. Second, as any code generation tool (and this is true of CoffeeScript as well), you’d better like the generated code. I didn’t, unfortunately. The code that I saw is not the code I would have written. What’s more, I didn’t always find the TypeScript code especially more expressive than what it gets compiled to. I also have a few questions. Is it possible to duck-type interfaces? For example, if I have an IPoint2D interface with x and y coordinates, can I pass any object that has x and y into a function that expects IPoint2D or do I need to necessarily create a class that implements that interface, and new up an instance that explicitly declares its contract? The appeal of dynamic languages is the ability to make objects as you go. This needs to be kept intact. More technical: why are generated variables and functions prefixed with _ rather than the $ that the EcmaScript spec recommends for machine-generated variables? In conclusion, while this is a good contribution to the set of ideas around JavaScript evolution, I don’t expect a lot of adoption outside of the devoted Microsoft developers, but maybe some influence on the language itself. But I’m often wrong. I would certainly not use it because I disagree with the central motivation for doing this: Anders explicitly says he built this because “writing application-scale JavaScript is hard”. I would restate that “writing application-scale JavaScript is hard for people who are used to statically-typed languages”. The community has built a set of good practices over the last few years that do scale quite well, and many people are successfully developing and maintaining impressive applications directly in JavaScript. You can play with TypeScript here: http://www.typescriptlang.org

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• Experiences with learning Chinese

  - by Greg Low

  I've had a few friends asking me about learning Chinese and what I've found works and doesn't work. I was answering a question on a mailing list today and I thought I should post this info where it might be useful to many. The question that was initially asked was whether Rosetta Stone was useful but I've provided much more info on learning the language here. I’ve used Rosetta Stone with Chinese but it’s really hard to know whether to recommend it or not. Rosetta Stone works the same way in all languages. They show you photos and then let you both see and hear the target language and get you to work out what they’re talking about. The thinking is that that’s how children learn. However, at first, I found it very frustrating. I’d be staring at photos trying to work out what they were really trying to get at. Sometimes it’s far from obvious. I could not have survived without Google Translate open at the same time. The other weird thing is that the photos are from a mixture of countries. While that’s good in a way, it also means that they are endlessly showing pictures of something that would never happen in the target language and culture. For any language, constant interaction with a speaker of the target language is needed. Rosetta Stone has a “Studio” option. That’s the best part of the program. In my case, it lets me connect around twice a week to a live online class from Beijing. Classes usually have the teacher plus two to four students. You get some Studio access with the initial packages but need to purchase it for ongoing use. I find it very inexpensive. It seems to work out to about $70 (AUD/USD) for six months. That’s a real bargain. The other downside to Rosetta Stone is that they tend to teach very formal language, but as with other languages, that’s not how the locals speak. It might have been correct at one point but no-one actually says that. As an example, Rosetta Stone teach Gonggòng qìche (pronounced roughly like “gong gong chee chure” for bus. Most of my friends from areas like Taiwan would just say Gongche. Google Translate says Zongxiàn (pronounced somewhat like “dzong sheean”) instead. Mind you, the Rosetta Stone option isn't really as bad as "omnibus"; it's more like saying "public bus". If you say the option they provide, people would understand you. I also listen to ChinesePod in the car. They also have SpanishPod. Each podcast is about five minutes of spoken conversation. It is very good for providing current language. Another resource I use is local Meetup groups. Most cities have these and for a variety of languages. It’s way less structured (just standard conversation) but good for getting interaction. The obvious challenge for Asian languages is reading/writing. The input editors for Chinese that are part of Windows are excellent. Many of my Chinese friends speak fluently but cannot read or write. I was determined to learn to do both. For writing, I’m talking about on a computer, not with a pen. (Mind you, I can barely write English with a pen nowadays). When using Rosetta Stone, you can choose to have the Chinese words displayed in pinyin (Wo xihuan xuéxí zhongguó) or in Chinese characters (???????) or both. This year, I’ve been forcing myself to just use the Chinese characters. I use a pinyin input editor in Windows though, as it’s very fast.  (The character recognition input in the iPad is also amazing). Notice from the example that I provided above that the pronunciation of the pinyin isn’t that obvious to us at first either.  Since changing to only using characters, I find I can now read many more Chinese characters fluently. It’s a major challenge though. I can read about 300 now and yet you need around 2,500 to be able to read a newspaper fairly well. Tones are a major issue for some Asian languages. Mandarin has four tones (plus a neutral tone) and there is a major difference in meaning between two words that are spelled the same in pinyin but with different tones. For example, Ma (3rd tone?) is a horse, Ma (1st tone?) is like “mom”, and ma (neutral tone?) is a question mark and so on. Clearly you don’t want to mix these up. As in English, they also have words that do sound the same but mean different things in different contexts. What’s interesting is that even though we see two words that differ only by tone as very similar, to a native speaker, if you say the right words with the wrong tone, you might as well have said a completely different word. My wife’s dialect of Chinese has eight tones. It’s much worse. The reason I’m so keen to learn to read/write Chinese is that even though the different dialects are pronounced so differently that speakers of one dialect often cannot understand another dialect, the writing is generally the same. The only difference is that many years ago, the Chinese government created a simplified set of characters for some of the most commonly used ones. Older Chinese and most Cantonese speakers often struggle with the simplified characters. This is the simplified form of “three apples”: ????   This is the traditional form of the same words: ????  Note that two of the characters are the same but the middle two are quite different. For most languages, the best thing is to watch current movies in the target language but to watch them with the target language as subtitles, not your native language. You want to know what they actually said, not what it roughly means (which is what the English subtitle would give you). The difficulty with Asian languages like Chinese is that you have the added challenge of understanding the subtitles when they are written in the target language. I wish there were Mandarin Chinese movies with pinyin subtitles. For learning to read characters, I also recommend HanCard on the iPad. It is targeted at the HSK language proficiency levels. (I’m intending to take the first HSK exam as soon as I’m ready). Hope that info helps someone get started.  

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• Twin Cities Code Camp 8 (EIGHT?!?)

  - by Chris Williams

  Yep, Twin Cities Code Camp EIGHT is just around the corner (11 days from this writing.) We've got some great sessions lined up, and a mini-mountain of swag to give away. If you haven't registered yet, we're ALMOST at capacity... so don't delay. See you there...

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• Why is GL_TEXTURE_MAX_ANISOTROPY_EXT undefined?

  - by Haydn

  So I'm writing my texture class in my opengl game, I get to the part where I would normally set GL_TEXTURE_MAX_ANISOTROPY_EXT, and I'm shocked to discover that it's undefined! This exact same extensions worked perfectly in a different application, so I know it's not a typo or something. It's worth noting that I'm getting my extensions using glcorearb.h, instead of glext.h, because I have no intention of supporting the compatibility profile. Could this be my problem, and if so, how do I work around it?

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• Review the New Migration Guide to SQL Server 2012 Always On

  - by KKline

  I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Cephas Lin, of Microsoft, last year at the SQL Saturday in Indianapolis and then later at the PASS Summit in the fall. Cephas has been writing content for SQL Server 2012 Always On. Cephas has recently published his first whitepaper, a migration guide to SQL Server AlwaysOn. Read it and then pass along any feedback: HERE Enjoy, -Kev - Follow me on Twitter !...(read more)

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• The Weekly Source Code 52 - You get using that LINQ, I dunna think it means what you think it means.

  - by Latest Microsoft Blogs

  Remember good developers don't just write source code, they also READ it. You don't just become a great poet by writing lots of poems. Read and absorb as well. Do check out the Source Code category of my blog here , there's (as of today) 15 Read More......(read more)

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• Spend a Week With Kalen Delaney in the Boston Area

  - by Adam Machanic

  If you're reading this blog, you're undoubtedly already familiar with Kalen Delaney . She's been writing the premier internals book series for Microsoft since SQL Server 2000, teaching SQL Server for many years before that, and is known as one of the most knowledgeable people in the world when it comes to how SQL Server works and the art of applying that knowledge to your day-to-day work. Given Kalen's extreme depth and reputation as a fantastic teacher, it should come as no surprise that last time...(read more)

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• Do you write common pre-conditions for a large number of unit test cases ?

  - by Vinoth Kumar

  I have heard/read writing common pre-conditions for a large number of test cases is a bad thing, since this dependency may cause large number of test cases to fail if something changes . What are your thoughts on it ? If this is so , then what exactly is the purpose of setUp() method in Junit that runs before each test case ? If the same code inside setUp() runs before each test case , why cant it run only once before running all the test cases together ?

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• Customizing / overriding ComboBox (2 replies)

  Hi, I would override a Windows.Forms.Combobox to have a MyObjectCollection instead of a ObjectCollection as Items property. I've try writing this code, but it seems that items are stored somewhere else (not in Items property). I can add items to collection but when I try to select an item from the combobox (at runtime) an exception tells me that there is no such element in Items (litterally it tel...

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• IIS8 Memory Improvements

  - by The Official Microsoft IIS Site

  There is a lot of buzz in the Internet Information Services (IIS) community about IIS 8, the version of IIS that is included with Windows Server 2012. While there are plenty of new features in IIS 8, for this writing I am going to focus on the memory improvements that you will see for the application pools. Memory is a key resource on an IIS server as it is often the first limiting factor if you planned your CPU and disk requirements appropriately. I was fortunate to be able to attend TechEd North...(read more)

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• Running MySQL in Batch Mode

  Anyone who has spent a fair amount of time working with databases comes to realize that common tasks like backups and data transfers should be run from a script rather than interactively. In this tutorial, we will be writing a common batch file to back up a table to a file.

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• Reading mp3 metadata?

  - by Blaze

  I am planing on writing an application using Vala. Its purposed is to import mp3 files from a location and rename them if necessary. The renaming information should be provided by the ID3 tags in the mp3 file such as the title and the number of the song. My target platform is Ubuntu (Linux). As the question says, I am searching for how can I achieve this on Vala. I think this functionality might be provided by Gstreamer.

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• SQL SERVER Understanding ALTER INDEX ALL REBUILD with Disabled Clustered Index

  This blog is in response to the ongoing communication with the reader who had earlier asked the question of SQL SERVER Disable Clustered Index and Data Insert. The same reader has asked me the difference between ALTER INDEX ALL REBUILD and ALTER INDEX REBUILD along with disabled clustered index. Instead of writing a big [...]...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Need your feedback on our new SQL Server Connectivity portal

  - by The Official Microsoft IIS Site

  SQL Server, as a database product, has grown over the years and there are multiple ways to connect to it. Often, the different ways to connect to the database get documented and discussed in the various technology sections, and the technology choice determines which connectivity method one is going to use. For example, if one is writing a C++ application then one has to go with ODBC whereas a PHP web site developer will choose the PHP driver of course. Until now, this information was scattered all...(read more)

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• Wvdial randomly drops 3G connection - How to auto-reconnect?

  - by askvictor

  I'm using a 3G modem for a router running Ubuntu server 10.04. I have the connection established using wvdial, which works successfully, but sometimes the connection drops. I would like it to auto re-connect. I've set the "auto reconnect" in wvdial.conf, but this does not seem to work. Any ideas? Am I missing a config option, or should I try writing a script which polls the network status and resets if ppp0 has gone down?

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• Benefits of an Internet Marketing Course About SEO Article

  An online job is a great opportunity for the people to make money online and prosper in the environment of internet. It is not difficult to start earning online if you have basic knowledge of computer and internet. But taking some training in your field of work is always very helpful to grow your business. So is in the case of SEO article writing. This special technique is not so difficult but training can bring perfection in your articles.

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• Security-related database settings are not restored when a DB is restored

  - by Greg Low

  A question came up today about whether it was a bug that the TRUSTWORTHY database setting isn't restored to its previous value when a database is restored. TRUSTWORTHY is a very powerful setting for a database. By design, it's not restored when a database is. We actually documented this behavior when writing the Upgrade Technical Reference for 2008: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/confirmation.aspx?familyId=66d3e6f5-6902-4fdd-af75-9975aea5bea7&displayLang=en The other settings that are...(read more)

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• Search Engine Optimization 101 - Properly Using Your Articles to Promote Your Site

  Article writing is one of the most common strategies used in Search Engine Optimization, and is also utilized as part of many Internet Marketing strategies used by SEO Companies today. If you have talent in coming up with quality articles to help promote your website -- and save yourself the expense of hiring an expert take care of it for you -- then you need to know how to properly used your work to promote your site. Here are some tips that should help you out.

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• how to convert avi (xvid) to mkv or mp4 (h264)

  - by bcsteeve

  Very noob when it comes to video. I'm trying to make sense of what I"m finding via Google... but its mostly Greek to me. I have a bunch of Avi files that won't play in my WD TV Play box. Mediainfo tells me they are xvid. Specs for the box show that should be fine... but digging through forums says its hit-and-miss. So I'd like to try converting them to h264 encoded MKV or mp4 files. I gather avconv is the tool, but reading the manual just has me really really confused. I tried the very basic example of: avconv -i file.avi -c copy file.mp4 it took less than 4 seconds. And it worked... sort of. It "played" in that something came up on the screen... but there was horrible artifacting and scenes would just sort of melt into each other. I want to preserve quality if possible. I'm not concerned about file size. I'm not terribly concerned with the time it takes either, provided I can do them in a batch. Can someone familiar with the process please give me a command with the options? Thank you for your help. I'm posting the mediainfo in case it helps: General Complete name : \\SERVER\Video\Public\test.avi Format : AVI Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave File size : 189 MiB Duration : 11mn 18s Overall bit rate : 2 335 Kbps Writing application : Lavf52.32.0 Video ID : 0 Format : MPEG-4 Visual Format profile : Advanced Simple@L5 Format settings, BVOP : 2 Format settings, QPel : No Format settings, GMC : No warppoints Format settings, Matrix : Default (H.263) Muxing mode : Packed bitstream Codec ID : XVID Codec ID/Hint : XviD Duration : 11mn 18s Bit rate : 2 129 Kbps Width : 720 pixels Height : 480 pixels Display aspect ratio : 16:9 Frame rate : 29.970 fps Standard : NTSC Color space : YUV Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0 Bit depth : 8 bits Scan type : Progressive Compression mode : Lossy Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.206 Stream size : 172 MiB (91%) Writing library : XviD 1.2.1 (UTC 2008-12-04) Audio ID : 1 Format : MPEG Audio Format version : Version 1 Format profile : Layer 3 Mode : Joint stereo Mode extension : MS Stereo Codec ID : 55 Codec ID/Hint : MP3 Duration : 11mn 18s Bit rate mode : Constant Bit rate : 192 Kbps Channel(s) : 2 channels Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz Compression mode : Lossy Stream size : 15.5 MiB (8%) Alignment : Aligned on interleaves Interleave, duration : 24 ms (0.72 video frame)

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• Trainings for Back-end Programmer [closed]

  - by Pius

  I am currently working as an Android developer but I want to continue my career as a back-end developer. I consider my self having a relatively good knowledge of networking, databases and writing low-level code and other stuff that is involved in back- and mid- ends. What would be some good courses, training or whatever to improve as a back-end developer? Not the basic ones but rather more advanced ones (not too much, I'm self-taught). What are the main events in this area?

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